But in a boxing match, when one fighter goes into a clinch, it’s because he’s getting the crap beat out of him. That was Romney tonight – trying to clinch as close to Obama’s positions on foreign policy as he could, and totally abandoning positions he’s held throughout his seven years running for president. But Obama kept landing the blows.

Some of Romney’s talking points got slapped down pretty hard. He made the mistake of bringing up the long-debunked nonsense attack that our navy has fewer ships than we had in 1916, which Obama slammed with:

But I think Governor Romney maybe hasn’t spent enough time looking at how our military works. You — you mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets — (laughter) — because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.

…And so the question is not a game of Battleship where we’re counting ships.

Here’s the clip:

Romney also repeated his bizarre claim that “Syria is Iran’s route to the sea” – bizarre because Iran is NOT next to Syria, but the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea ARE. You’ve gotta wonder about this one, since he keeps repeating it… why?

Play to the moderates

On that measure, he seems to have sneaked through. He didn’t come off as scary. He seemed to know most of his stuff. He distanced himself from his own fiery rhetoric, and that of his foreign policy team. Pity it’s those guys who’ll be in charge if this chameleon manages to fool enough of the people enough of the time to get elected President.

… but hold on to the base…

Did he piss off conservatives? He’s been attacking Obama for calling for a December 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan; tonight he was unequivocally in favor of getting out. He backed off from his sabre-rattling on Iran.. to just calling for even stricter sanctions.

And he actually called for an increase in foreign aid in order to make the world a safer place – something that is anathema to his hard-core conservatives.

Opinion roundup:

You have to give Romney and his campaign credit. They said they were going to do it. They telegraphed the punch five months ago. They told the entire nation that there would come a day in which everything Willard Romney had said about anything in his entire seven-year quest to be president would be rendered, in the memorable word of Nixon White House flack Ron Ziegler, “inoperable.” They told us quite honestly that their entire campaign was going to be based on an ongoing argument between the Willard Romney who ran for the Republican nomination and the Willard Romney who thereupon would run for president. They told us he would renege on his previous positions, and he has. They told us he would reverse his field over and over again, and he has. They told us that the only real principle to which the man will ever hold firm is that he will be utterly unprincipled.

…It was purely surreal, and it was not made any less so by the fact that Romney was clearly uncomfortable with his new moderate foreign-policy programming.

Mitt Romney has nothing really coherent or substantive to say about domestic policy, but at least he can sound energetic and confident about it. On foreign policy, the subject of Monday night’s final presidential debate, he had little coherent to say and often sounded completely lost. That’s because he has no original ideas of substance on most world issues, including Syria, Iran and Afghanistan.

…. Mr. Romney’s closing statement summed it all up. He said almost nothing about foreign policy. He moved back to his comfort zone: cheerfully delivered disinformation about domestic policy.

Per Romney’s insistence on preventing defense cuts, recognize that they are his version of the stimulus. Those ships he speaks of equate to jobs at shipyards, the planes to jobs at Boeing/Lockeed/etc., and the other materials to other jobs across the country. I think Obama’s mocking line about bayonets and horses was quite amusing, but it will be less so to people whose jobs depend on such military spending.

Just going by the reactions from Carville and Fleischer on CNN (I’ve switched back because that’s where you go to find out the conventional wisdom) it’s already clear what the talking points will be. Fleischer talking about how this debate doesn’t matter because the public is focused on the economy, that’s a clear signal that he knew Romney fucked the dog tonight. This should be the death-blow to Romney, but I’ve said that before and been wrong.

The lies this man has said tonight have been more numerous than I can ever remember in any debate. The man does not have the moral character to be president, in my opinion. … Let me put this as best I can: I don’t believe this current series of total reversals would last a micro-second after his possible inauguration.

As a matter of substance, it was depressing in principle that this was the level of presidential-campaign discussion on China, India (nothing, or close to it), climate change and the environment (nothing I heard), energy (next to nothing), Europe (ditto). But it was more striking as a matter of substance that on virtually no issue did Romney make an actual criticism, of any sort, of Obama’s policy or record. Instead it was, “I agree, but you could have done it better.”

As the debate went on, Romney tried many times to move the international affairs discussion back to the economy where he was more comfortable. It was as if he had only 30 minutes of foreign policy talking points for a 90 minute debate. As a result he seemed to string together random thoughts which often made him sound incoherent.

The first half hour was a draw, though President Obama scored by default when Romney either didn’t or couldn’t attack on Libya. After that though Romney began to falter as Obama became more direct, organized and declarative. Romney seemed increasingly lost. Obama seemed comfortable, happy. The visuals told the story.

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